The Kindness of Strangers and Friends

This day was one of tired celebration. I'm in Lisbon, exhausted and relieved at getting my Portuguese visa renewed after months of over-the-top stress about the difficulties of scheduling a renewal interview in a system badly cracked under strains from international politics of recent years. I used to walk in to an office of Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras (SEF) and there would be almost nobody there, and business was settled quickly. Now, even when I tried to book an appointment (walking in is no longer allowed) six weeks in advance, I was given a date for a renewal interview that was three and a half months after my visa would expire. Only by great good luck did I get an earlier date when somebody canceled and my lady called the immigration offices at just the right moment.

I went out to a local restaurant near our Benfica apartment to celebrate alone; the dinner of monkfish and shrimp rice was perfect with a vinho verde tinto.

As I ate, I read various articles on my ever-present iPhone; one - "Helping Others Become Bilingual" in Psychology Today - spoke in particular to my present experience of life and things that have moved me so often in the past six years as I learned a new language and sometimes struggled more than a little to find my way in a new culture I may never understand entirely. The article is basically about kindness.

Kindness is what brought me to Portugal. It is, of course, not a patented property of the country and culture, though I have encountered more of it here than anywhere else, and I believe that there are some cultural factors which cultivate it more than in some other places. The kindness I have experienced in nearly every country, sometimes momentary, sometimes sustained over decades, is the mortar which holds together the foundation of most of what has been good in my life, and some significant part of that has been linguistic kindness in a large part. When I was an exchange student in the Saarland many years ago, I was welcomed into homes of people who spoke a dialect I found baffling, and they kindly tolerated my lack of understanding, never ostracized nor criticized me and patiently translated bits like "Hoscht gess?" into more familiar forms like "Hast du gegessen?". As a consequence, the many dialects of the Saarland and Rhine-Palatinate region of Germany will always have a special place in my heart.

Poland taught me that the language of kindness need not be verbal. I was buying bread one morning while attending a professional conference, and I had tied my young wire-haired vizsla Jambor to a metal chair outside the bakery. The air brakes of a bus frightened him, and he took off running across a busy street. I screamed No!!! and ran after him into the street, falling full length in front of a car which stopped just in time not to kill me. I ran after my dog and he raced down the sidewalk opposite; after several hundred meters some pedestrians managed to stop him before he ran out into a busy intersection, where he might very well have been killed. I held my young dog, shaking and crying, wondering how it was that we were still alive. The voices around me were comforting, but I understood nothing; I just shook until an old man quietly put his arm over my shoulder, and I could breathe again. I returned to the bakery with the bent and broken chair, expecting to be screamed at for the destruction, but the owner of the shop invited me and my dogs (Ajax, my Drahthaar, was also with me and also managed not to get killed as he followed me on the run) inside and gave me tea, telling me not to worry.

The Dutch are known for being brusque and rude, but in that crudest of cultures I have experienced kindnesses I can never describe without tears and memories of clients who have become friends who will never be forgotten wherever they go.

Such stories are everywhere, and I suspect nearly everyone, anywhere, has at least a few. Bilinguals surely have some, more like a lot, of kindnesses shown when they stumbled and fell over new or rusty tongues. Today again I had my share, in the SEF interview where I proudly mangled the Portuguese language with a patient immigration clerk, at dinner tonight as the waiter kindly confirmed my dessert order while teaching me the correct way to pronounce the fruit I wanted and many times in between.

My six years have, I think, given me some insight into what it might be like for some of the many refugees and immigrants in this world as they struggle to come to terms with new languages and cultures, often without the financial and other material resources I have and with backgrounds and skin colors that might inspire less sympathy than mine usually do. When I think life in my wonderful country of choice can be hard at times I feel shame when I remember how much harder some things are for so many others.

I spent time living in a very poor neighborhood of Évora, because I wanted to get away from all the educated Portuguese who would immediately switch to English with me. The Psychology Today article brought back many memories of that time and the extraordinary kindness of the people who, upon being told that I was not returning to the country of my birth, but instead intended to make theirs my home, welcomed me and patiently taught me new words and lavished me with kindnesses of every degree on my many walk with the dogs through their streets. The local grocery workers even took extra time to show me local foods and teach me to pronounce all the things I pointed to buy.

My goodnight graphic

I am not always kind in return, not even with those who are kindest to me, and that is simply wrong. My beautiful doutora spoke the most miserable English when we met, and I was grateful for her patient communication and complete acceptance of my complex and usually difficult self, but now that she has achieved an English fluency that would make her a good international lecturer I unkindly nitpick her word choices and burst with impatience and yet another fucked-up participle that anyone would understand anyway with no trouble. And I fail to give credit most of the time when I steal her original perversions of English and pass them off as my own linguistic creativity with the applause of my professional peers. Yes, I am a plagiarist of sorts, probably, and an ingrate in any case.

Of course, I have professional justifications for being a linguistic asshole; I feel - probably rightly so - that my strict separation of languages I use is necessary to keep my edge as a writer and translator and not fall into the incompetent muck that is the medium of the bulk market translation service bog. I cringe when I see the actual incompetence of some language professionals who are not quite Dunning-Kruger cases but are at least not in the fraction of the top percent that so many of my friends inhabit. But I'm getting that all wrong in most respects. As some others do too.

Michael Moore made the point well in his autobiography when he wrote of his time with writer Kurt Vonnegut in that great man's last year. Kurt said that his son Mark had figured out the meaning of life for him, with all its senselessness and pain. "We're here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is." That's about right.

Sweet Greek olives come to Portugal

The Good Doctor is widely travelled, and brings back to Portugal many interesting culinary ideas from around the world, using these to complement the traditions of her native land. So when I began to harvest olives from her trees to pickle for the coming year, she looked a little skeptically at the plastic water bottles full of crushed and slit olives and asked me Why don't you make sweet Greek olives?

I had never heard of those before, and she could not tell me much about them except that she had bought some in a shop while driving through Greece some years ago, and they were rather good, so she would prefer that I make some of those instead of the usual spiced pickles all the local farmers do. OK, I said, and began to look for information on the Internet. Nothing useful was found in searches using terms in English, German and Portuguese. I found some pages talking about candied olives made from pickled ones, but nothing useful describing the process starting with fresh olives.

What to do? I asked a Greek colleague for help, and a few minutes later, she sent me a link to a web page in Greek which describes making sweet olives and olive jam.

Since I can't do much more with Greek than sound the words out and search my brain for possible derivates in a language I know, it wasn't clear to me if I needed to work with any particular sort of olives, and I thought the suggested extraction time to remove the bitter elements from the raw olives was optimistic at best, so I took notes and prepared to "transcreate" the recipe for the olives I have available (based on my past experience picking them) and my own preferred approach to scaling recipes. Thus I arrived at the following recipe:

Azeitonas doces de Elvas

1. Gather ripe, dark olives, de-stem and rinse them, then place them in clean one- to two-liter plastic bottles. Fill the bottles with fresh, cold water and cap them.
2. Change the water daily for about two weeks, testing the bitterness of the olives until it is reduced to an acceptable level. The time needed will vary according to the olive variety, the degree of ripeness and your personal taste. The Greek recipe this one is based on suggests four or five days time with daily water changes, but that is simply too little time for my olives and my taste.
3. After the olives are debittered, cut the tops of the plastic bottles to remove the olives. Then use a de-pitter (a descaroçador de cerejas - a cherry pitter - will do the job) to remove the pits from the olives.
4. Weigh the olives and place them in a saucepan or small pot.
5. Add the same weight of water to the pan (so for 600 g of de-pitted olives, add 600 ml water).
6. Add sugar to the pot amounting to 40% of the weight of the olives (which would be 240 g sugar for 600 g olives).
7. Bring to a hard boil on high heat, and let the mixture boil for 20 minutes, with occasional stirring. Then remove from heat and allow to rest overnight.
8. The next day, add more sugar to the pot - 20% of the weight of the olives (so another 120 g of sugar if you are working with 600 g of de-pitted olives). 
9. Boil the mixture hard for another 20 minutes until the syrup thickens. Then remove from heat.
10. Can the sweet olives in sterilized jars following the usual hygenic procedures or serve them fresh, warm or cold.

MpT, limericks and innovative disruption in Porto and Seville

A few weeks ago I received a kind invitation to the JABA Partner Summit in Porto, Portugal. It's a unique event hosted by JABA CEO Joaquim Alves, subsidized by various solution providers whose tools he uses in his business, which I think is the largest translation agency in the country. I wasn't really sure what to expect, though with the likes of Across and my old nemesis Dion Wiggins, aka "Donny the Wig", godfather of the MpT Mafia, Mr. Get-On-The-MT-Boat-Or-Drown himself, I knew it would be plenty evil. Sure enough, on the first day DW challenged me to a duel, so at memoQfest this year in Budapest, we will meet on the field of honor in the park across from the Gundel and settle our differences at ten paces.

I encountered a veritable rogues' gallery of linguistic sausage shoppers at the summit days, discussing plans to conquer the world. As GALA board chairman Robert Etches put it, controlling 1% of content translation is not enough, the elite cabal of translation technologists must march boldly forward with an army of cyborg post-editors and their purely electronic betters and take the 99% by storm, as the 1% have taken control of the rest in society at large.

Photo courtesy of Stefan Gentz

People like that need watching, so when I heard of the conspirators' bus to Seville for another of those wicked GALA gatherings which yield so many damning and amusing YouTube video clips (see In HampsTr We Trust) I decided to go undercover and ride along. As you might expect with me, Asia Online, Across and a bunch of capitalist translation agency owners on a bus, there would soon be blood on the floor.

Photo courtesy of Stefan Gentz

As the team of emergency paramedics treated my head wound and did their best to save me from the shock and awe of a relentless technology agenda, co-conspirators celebrated by the bus with cigarettes and champagne, toasting The New Word Order.

Thanks to the heroic efforts of Portuguese paramedics I was able to return to the scene of the crime, where I fought to stay awake and alert to survive the journey to the L10n Den that awaited.

Shore 'nuff, there was an orgy of celebration for the Power of Machines. Not only do they do translation that way, but at the 5-star Barceló Sevilla Renacimiento the 1% Masters have even done away with the baristas (is that why the roses bloom so well?) and replaced them with Nespresso machines to make the coffee. I kept myself alert throughout the three days of the meeting with milky triple ristrettos. I considered the evil in store for Third World babies with that technology as the caffeine hit my veins and I buzzed from one point of innovative disruption to another.

The Wonderful World of Disruption in Translation

Paula Barbary Shanno(n), disruptive Pirate Queen and the Right Hand of Darkness for Sales at Lionbridge, shared her ecstatic vision of such disruption in an explosive, multimedia keynote celebrating the slash-and-burn creativity of Big Wordsters who have learned to think and act in small ways, moving ever closer to Mr. Etches' vision of a world in which commodities such as translation are free and profits are reserved for those studs who service the customers so well. I could see the excitement of bulk market CEOs as she spoke eloquently in well-tuned corporatist clichés. I could imagine the disruptive IEDs of innovation catching the proud wordsmiths en route to their value-priced boutique forges and the cyborg armies of post-editors blasting the bounds of mere human translation and meaning to compose new algorithmic hymns to Common Sense and Cost Reduction.

This photo is the only thing that isn't sharp with this perceptive language and training consultant

But a kinder, gentler, revolutionary vision of disruptive innovation was offered by one who actually took the time to read and understand Clayton Christensen's work, rather than simply plagiarize it, Ms. Diana Sanchez of Nova Languages in Barcelona. When she gave her excellent presentation of one of the best-organized classic PEMpT workflows, I was impressed. Not by the idea of such an application, which I consider to be rather toxic in most cases, but by the fact that it was so well-structured, a good reference against which to measure alternatives I think. And the presentation was excellent, one of the few I have seen delivered quietly behind a podium which would not put me to sleep. However, I objected (rather rudely in fact) to the title of her talk, as I considered the process described neither innovative nor disruptive.

Ms. Sanchez mercifully spared me the public execution I deserved for my insistent error and waited until the knowledge-sharing roundtable later that day to explain the unique costing model applied by Nova in serving their cash-poor startup clientele in the Barcelona area (innovative - check!) and then went on to explain patiently that the "disruptive" character of the innovation was that it entered the lower end of the market where there was in fact no choice, for financial reasons, but to accept quality compromises. Usually when I hear such arguments, they come from the mouth of some bulk market bogster which I am tempted to punch, but with Ms. Sanchez and another Nova associate at that table what I heard was a tale of respectful partnership with aspiring new businesses. And a very profitable one at that. Hut ab!

Perhaps the most interesting thing I learned at my first GALA event was that, although the lighted stage and multimedia extravaganza might be dominated by the rapacious and somewhat idiotic one-percenters of the corporatist translation world and their acolytes, who comprise perhaps another four to nine percent, the vast majority of translation company CEOs who attend are sincere partners of the language service providers (translators and interpreters) they depend on, and they earn my respect in stride. I asked myself why some of my long-term, struggling agency partners were not represented in the crowd of 370 attendees and thought perhaps that might be why they were struggling. The information shared by so many presenters and by the mingling participants was worth far more than the four-figure cost of registration.

After a quarter century of not speaking the language, I still give a shit about Japanese!

I decided that, as long as I was there to keep an eye on the troublemakers, I might as well add my own value for the deserving majority, so I made it my mission to seek out translation company owners, project managers and localization specialists and destroy their misconception that there is no viable speech recognition available for languages such as Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Slovak, Russian, Arabic, Turkish, Korean, Norwegian et alia. Throughout the three days of the conference I tested my recently researched solution with native speakers of the many "minor languages" that are so important in the global business ecosystem, with excellent results. It even worked without errors for Romanian in the crowded lunch room, so I suppose it could be used in the open plan offices one finds in many translation sweatshops. The recognized text can be transferred easily to translation management systems for alignment, review and quality assurance, allowing me to kick back with my goats now, guzzle sangria and pet the chickens as I knock out high quality translation in the Alentejan sun. One translation agency owner from Cairo estimated that this new method might increase the hourly earnings of his freelance Arabic translators eightfold. My kind of disruption, certainly better than the sort of coke-fueled destruction that some corporate high flyers are addicted to.

The short, easy bus ride back home after the GALA event ended got a little complicated when the border zone resentments of the Spanish against their Portuguese betters were visited upon me in a practical joke that left me stranded for an extra day in Badajoz, where I took a 2 am kick in the ribs from a pugnacious little station minder who was frustrated to learn that I had done the impossible and bought a ticket for the 4:15 am bus that he had told me I was not allowed to board. It was interesting to learn that my Portuguese has improved to the point where the Spanish think I'm a native and as I near the border hate me accordingly. Just as I learned in Germany years ago, sometimes there are advantages to keeping a foreign accent, and, alas, I always end up the loser with any language I learn.

In the final kilometers between Estremoz and Évora, where I faced another two-day gauntlet of memoQ lectures and workshops at the university with my interns, I reflected on the lessons of my nine-day translation business odyssey, the high points such as, in the middle of an excellent presentation of the Open Source application translate5, the brave and honest call by Marc Mittag for Germans to forgive the debts of suffering Med countries as they were forgiven their far greater debts after the horrors of the Second World War, after which they experienced their foreign-financed Wirtschaftswunder, to those moments of bulk market bogster idiocy, calling for us all to drink the shitstream of the worldwide content firehose. Mr. Etches can take his 99% and the consequences thereof; my glass is more than half full :-)

Notes from a silly discussion of the need for greed.

As is often the case, I found poetic inspiration in the lessons learned and penned these limericks in the final kilometers of my return:

Megalomaniac Bob
will MT his way out of a job.
Being a fool,
he forgot the old rule
that the 1% own the whole mob

In Moreslavia's quality check,
the meaning can just go to Heck.
In the LQA game
Renato's the name
of the guy who is stacking the deck!

Let the corporates trumpet success
and disrupt the whole holy mess.
With speech recognition
we'll pay our tuition
and unequal pay then redress.

memoQ&A in Porto - good people, great bagels!

Last night from 6:00 to 9:30 I enjoyed a "memoQ&A Evening" at the Porto Bagel Café as a reward for surviving the long bus ride to Porto/Gaia from Évora to attend the JABA Partner Summit. About 25 local colleagues attended to hear my not-as-short-as-promised presentation and discuss approaches to memoQ and other translation technologies as our working tools. The evening was part of the Translators in Residence initiative and a good start to my second visit to the area after my whirlwind tour last month to investigate venues for teaching events. Many thanks to the sponsors. the International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters and Chip7 of Évora for providing the funding and tools (an excellent LCD projector - thank you, Carlos!) to do this.

I very much appreciate IAPTI's commitment to the professional education and continuing development of my good colleagues in Portugal, particularly in difficult economic times when many findit difficult to attend translators' events in faraway places. The evening was free for all attendees, who only had to pay for whatever they drank (great coffee - I had my usual galão) and ate (the best bagels in Portugal!).

After an initial hour of snacks, coffee and chat, the evening began with a discussion of the game-changing implications of speech recognition technologies for our working lives. Not only is it now possible for colleagues to use high-quality speech recognition on desktop computer and laptops in languages such as Hungarian and Portuguese, which are not currently supported by Dragon NaturallySpeaking (using, for example, the integrated recognition tools in the Mac Yosemite OS, as demonstrated with SDL Trados Studio and memoQ in Lisbon the day that SDL conquered Portuguese translation), smartphones are part of the game now too. Since picking up an older iPhone model (4S) for a few hundred euros about a month ago, I have had excellent results testing it with English, German, Russian and Portuguese and e-mailing texts to myself with just a few taps on the phone's screen. Once transferred as an e-mail, the text is then aligned in a CAT tool such as memoQ and subjected to tagging, QA and other procedures of the usual virtual translation working environments.

The use of memoQ and other CAT tools for single-language original authoring and text revision was also discussed. This flexible workflow extends the relevance of translation environment tools well beyond the usual limits within which translators and translation companies live and operate and offers interesting prospects for collaboration and re-use of creative resources. This topic willalso be covered next week in a lecture and workshop at Universidade de Évora and in an eCPD webinar on June 2, 2015.

Interoperability is another important topic for translators; I discussed different ways in which I use SDL Trados Studio and other tools to prepare projects to work in memoQ and vice versa as well as mz highly profitable use of SDL Multiterm to enhance customer loyalty and my professional image with this terminology management ssystem's excellent output management features.

Other tips and tricks in the memoQ&A included the untapped potential of LiveDocs, tracked changes and row histories in memoQ, dealing with embedded objects, graphics and transcription, PDF 3-ways and new tricks for nasty and/or illegible image PDFs, versioning and a concept for transforming translation memory concordancing into something much, much more useful and less prone to errors in editing and translation.

Copies of the slides from the evening's presentation are available here. It is, however, merely a palimpsest of the evening.

Many thanks also to colleague and translation tools teacher Felix do Carmo for kindly chauffeuring me around town and for the interesting tour of the training and production facilities at his company, TIPS.

SDL conquers translation at Universidade Nova in Lisbon

The day started inauspiciously for me, with a TomTom navigation system determined to keep me from the day planned at Lisbon's New University to discuss SDL Trados Studio and its place in the translation technology ecosphere. When the fourth GPS location almost proved a charm, and I hiked the last kilometer on an arthritic foot, swearing furiously that this was my last visit to the Big City, I found the lecture hall at last, an hour and a half late, and managed to arrive just after Paul Filkin's presentation of the SDL OpenExchange, an underused, but rather interesting and helpful resource center for plug-ins and other resources for SDL Trados Studio victims to bridge the gap between its out-of-the-box configurations and what particular users or workflows might require. There are a lot of good things to be found there - the memoQ XLIFF definition and Glossary Converter are my particular favorites. Paul talked about many interesting things, I was told, and there is even a plug-in created for SDL Trados Studio by a major governmental organization which has functionality much like memoQ's LiveDocs (discussed afterward but not shown in the talk I missed, however). In the course of the day, Paul also disclosed an exciting new feature for SDL Trados Studio which many memoQ users have been missing in the latest version, memoQ 2014 R2 (see the video at the end).

I arrived just in time for the highlight of the day, the demonstration of Portuguese speech recognition by David Hardisty and two of his masters students, Isabel Rocha and Joana Bernardo. Speech recognition is perhaps one of the most interesting, useful and exciting technologies applied to translation today, but its application is limited to the languages available, which are not so many with the popular Dragon Naturally Speaking application from Nuance. Portuguese is curiously absent from the current offerings despite its far more important role in the world than minor languages like German or French.

Professor Hardisty led off with an overview of the equipment and software used and recommended (slides available here); the solution for Portuguese uses the integrated voice recognition features of the Macintosh operating system. With Parallels Desktop 10 for Mac it can be used for Windows applications such as SDL Trados Studio and memoQ as well. Nuance provides the voice recognition technology to Apple, and Brazilian and European Portuguese are among the languages provided to Apple which are not part of Nuance's commercial products for consumers (Dragon Naturally Speaking and Dragon Dictate).

Information from the Apple web site states that

Dictation lets you talk where you would type — and it now works in over 40 languages. So you can reply to an email, search the web or write a report using just your voice. Navigate to any text field, activate Dictation, then say what you want to write. Dictation converts your words into text. OS X Yosemite also adds more than 50 editing and formatting commands to Dictation. So you can turn on Dictation and tell your Mac to bold a paragraph, delete a sentence or replace a word. You can also use Automator workflows to create your own Dictation commands.

Portuguese was among the languages added with OS X Yosemite.

Ms. Bernardo began her demonstration by showing her typing speed - somewhat less than optimal due to the effects of disability from cerebral palsy. I was told that this had led to some difficulties during a professional internship, where her typing speed was not sufficient to keep up with the expectations for translation output in the company. However, I saw for myself how the integrated speech recognition features enable her to lay down text in a word processor or translation environment tool as quickly as or faster than most of us can type. In Portuguese, a language I had thought not available for work by my colleagues translating into that language.

A week before I had visited Professor Hardisty's evening class, where after my lecture on interoperability for CAT tools, Ms. Rocha had shown me how she works with Portuguese speech recognition as I do, in "mixed mode" using a fluid work style of dictation, typing, and pointing technology. She said that her own work is not much faster than when she types, but that the physical and mental strain of the work is far less than when she types and the quality of her translation tends to be better, because she is more focused on the text. This greater concentration on words, meaning and good communication matches my own experience, but I don't necessarily believe her about the speed. I don't think she has actually measured her throughput. My observation after the evening class and again at the event with SDL was that she works as fast as I do with dictation, and when I have a need for speed that can go to triple my typing rate or more per hour.

In any case, I am very excited that speech recognition is now available to a wider circle of professionals, and with integrated dictation features in the upcoming Windows 10 (a free upgrade for Windows 8 users), I expect this situation will only improve. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of this technology for improving the ergonomics of our work. It's more than just leveling the field for gifted colleagues like Joana Bernardo, who can now bring to bear her linguistic skills and subject knowledge at a working speed on par with other professionals - or faster - but for someone like me who often works with pain and numbness in the hands from strain injuries, or all the rest of you banging away happily on keyboards, with an addiction to pain meds in your future perhaps, speech recognition offers a better future. Some are perhaps put off by the unhelpful, boastful emphasis of others on high output, which anyone familiar with speech recognition and human-assisted machine pseudo-translation (HAMPsTr) editing knows is faster and better than what any processes involving human revision of computer-generated linguistic sausage can produce, but it's really about working better and doing better work with better personal health. It's not about silly "Hendzel Units".

It has been pointed out a few times that Mac dictation or other speech recognition implementations lack the full range of command features found in an application like Dragon Naturally Speaking. That's really irrelevant. The most efficient speech recognition users I know do not use a lot of voice-controlled command for menu options, etc. I don't bother with that stuff at all but work instead very comfortably with a mix of voice, keyboard and mouse as I learned from a colleague who can knock off over 8,000 words of top-quality translation per short, restful day before taking the afternoon off to play with her cats or go shopping and spend some of that 6-figure translation income that she had even before learning to charge better rates.

Professor Hardisty also gave me a useful surprise in his talk - a well-articulated suggestion for a much more productive way to integrate machine translation in translation workflows:

David Hardisty's "pre-editing" approach for MpT output

The approach he suggested is actually one of the techniques I use with multiple TM matches in the working translation grid where I dictate - look at a match or TM suggestion displayed in a second pane and cherry-pick any useful phrases or sentence fragments and simply speak them along with selected term suggestions from glossaries, etc. and do it right the first time, faster than post-editing. This does work, much better than the sort of nonsense pushed too often into university curricula now by the greedy technotwits and Linguistic Sausage Purveyors, who in their desire for better margins and general disrespect of human service providers and employees fail to understand that good people, well-treated and empowered with the right tools, will beat the software and hardware software of "MT" and its hamsterized process extensions every time. Hardisty's approach is the most credible suggestion I have seen yet for possibly useful application of machine pseudo-translation in good work. Don't dump the MpT sewage directly into the target text stream like so many do as they inevitably and ignorantly diminish the level of achievable output quality.

After the lunch break, Paul Filkin gave an excellent Q&A clinic on Trados Studio features, showing solutions for challenges faced by users at all levels. It's always a pleasure to see him bring his encyclopedic knowledge of that difficult environment to bear in poised, useful ways to make it almost seem easy to work with the tools. I've sent many people to Paul and his team for help over the years, and none have been disappointed according to the feedback I have heard. The Trados Studio "clinic" at Universidade Nova reminded me why.

Finally, in the last hour of the day, I presented my perspective on how the SDL Trados Studio suite can integrate usefully in teamwork involving colleagues and customers with other technology and how over the years as a user of Déja Vu and later memoQ as my primary tool, the Trados suite has often made my work easier and significantly improved my earnings, for example with the excellent output management options for terminology in SDL Trados MultiTerm.

I spoke about the different levels of information exchange in interoperable translation workflows. I have done so often in the past from a memoQ perspective, but on this day I took the SDL Trados angle and showed very specifically, using screenshots from the latest build of SDL Trados Studio 2014, how this software can integrate beautifully and reliably as the hub or a spoke in the wheel of work collaboration.

The examples I presented using involved specifics of interoperability with memoQ or OmegaT, but they work with any good, professional tool. (Please note that Across is neither good nor a professional translation tool.) Those present also left with interoperability knowledge that no others in the field of translation have as far as I know - a simple way to access all the data in a memoQ Handoff package for translation in other environments like SDL Trados Studio, including how to move bilingual LiveDocs content easily into the other tool's translation memory.

Working in a single translation environment for actual translation is ergonomically critical to productivity and full focus on producing good content of the best linguistic character and subject presentation without the time- and quality-killing distractions of "CAT hopping", switching between environments such as SDL Trados Studio, memoQ, Wordfast, memSource, etc. Busy translators who learn the principles of interoperability and how to move the work in and out of their sole translation tool (using competitive tools for other tasks at which they may excel, such as preparing certain project types, extracting or outputting terminology, etc.) will very likely see a bigger increase in earnings than they can by price increases in the next decade. On those rare occasions where it might be desirable to use a different tool or to cope with the stress of change from one tool to another, harmonization of customizable features such as keyboard shortcuts can be very helpful.

I ended my talk with a demonstration of how translation files (SDLXLIFF) and project packages (SDLPPX) from SDL Trados Studio can be brought easily into memoQ for translation in that ergonomic environment, with all the TMs and terminology resources, returning exactly the content required in an SDLRPX file. Throughout the presentation there was some discussion of where SDL and its competitors can and should strive to go beyond the current and occasionally dubious levels of "compatibility" for even better collaboration between professionals and customers in the future.

One of the attendees, Steve Dyson, also published an interesting summary of the day on his blog.

Two years in Alentejo

A little over a week ago I celebrated the second anniversary of my arrival in Portugal with friends, who suggested a trip to town for food and fado. So we went to Casa de Fados Maria Severa in Évora and enjoyed a long night of wonderful music that went on well past the official midnight closing time. This was my first live experience with that musical genre, but it won't be the last. I'm not much of a tourist, so I have yet to experience many of the things that a typical foreign visitor might see in a week's whirlwind tour of Portugal. I came here to enjoy a normal life with good, normal people who respect each other and live as they can with the means available. The famous Alentejan cuisine reflects and amplifies this way of making do and doing it better with its minimalist approach of few ingredients, usually simple and inexpensive, but fresh and sound, with a resulting taste matched or exceeded by few. Life in Alentejo is best savored slowly, like aguardente caseira.

When I first arrived, my intent was only to enjoy a week of vacation, the first real one in nearly a decade. At the time I was living in Germany, where I had been since 1999 and where I expected to remain until my spare parts were harvested by the organ banks. Although I have nearly a 40 year history of close contact with the German language, come from a family of predominantly German heritage and always preferred to speak German at home in the US, and many of my friends in Germany are among the best people I am privileged to know, I never felt at home in the culture there, particularly away from the university environments. Many are concerned today about PEGIDA and other anti-social movements, but as one who usually flew under the cultural radar and passed for German, I find none of this new or surprising. So many things there which are accepted as normal, like the constant police guard on every synagogue, simply do not feel normal to me, and I could never stop taking it personally when imperfect strangers would try to engage me in conversations about how foreigners were ruining the country. Of course, such ugliness is not a majority characteristic there or in my country of origin, the US, but the minority is large and assertive enough in both countries that I prefer to live with a bit more tolerant quiet and hope for pleasant visits from like-minded German and American friends.

I used to think of Portugal as The End of the Earth, a place so far removed from the centers of activity that it was unlikely I would ever visit. Certainly, when I did decide to spend a little quiet time here looking at megaliths and old churches, and a friend spent some 9 hours and 5 bottles of wine trying to convince me not to visit this place where he believed the people were in a deep state of depression over the bad economy and the loss of their colonies (!!!), I did not expect Portugal to be The Journey's End. The sort of place where, after wandering too long on stony paths, you can put your feet up by a fire, like the one behind my office desk, and know you are at home.

Some like it hot!

Of course,  it rains even in paraíso, and the adjustment process, even in a good place, is often not easy. I think the greatest challenge for me, once I figured out where to find bread yeast and pectin, was dealing with linguistic isolation. It still is. For most of the first year I lived here, I kept my head down as I dealt with the administrative details of establishing residence and a business presence and moved house three times until I found a place whose dimensions and character truly met my needs. I spent little time learning more than the rudiments of the Portuguese language in that time, because the more I experienced that beautiful language, the more I knew it would break my heart to have to leave it. After it was clear that I could stay on, for another year at least, I sought out a part of town where the socioeconomic profile made it unlikely that I would encounter a lot of English speakers in my daily routine, and I made rapid progress with the local language for a few months as I fought a plague of mice and cockroaches before moving to a quiet little quinta several kilometers outside of town, a deep, narrow property perfect for training dogs and doing a bit of gardening.

Quinta Branca do Quartel ao Louredo

I'm fortunate to be near the ecopista, a beautiful path for pedestrians, equestrians and bicyclists on what used to be the train route for grain deliveries from the nearby farms. When the weather is nice (that is, most of the time), it's a great way to go to town or much farther out, where your way may be crossed by rabbits and javelis and not so many people.

It's been 16 years since I've lived on a farm, and it's slow going to figure out how to do what I want to with the land when the conditions are so different from what I knew before and I struggle to find the right words for conversations with neighbors about chickens and manure. Most of my attempts at a vegetable garden so far have been greeted with enthusiasm by legions of snails, who may someday adorn my dinner plate as penance for their voracious crimes. I've taken only a few random, neglected fruits from the land so far; a lot of careful thought and rehabilitation will be required, but this is a welcome break from the daily challenges of German translation, technology consulting and teaching for clients and colleagues at the other ends of the Earth. However, I was fortunate to find guidance for what to do with the crop of the dozen olive trees scattered about my six acres:

Home-cured olives and Alentejan white bread to fuel the next memoQ tutorial

I never would have imagined that my own cured olives, spiced as I like them, would be so much better than the ones I've eaten from store-bought jars, in restaurants and bought at farmers' markets and other places for years. Perhaps by next autumn I'll have figured out how and where to convert the bulk of the crop to oil, which was a staple in my kitchen long before I came to Portugal.

Life here is good, but unpredictable, even less predictable than the changing tides of translation in the past half decade. But where the general environment is a healthy one and the culture is tolerant, friendly and mostly flexible, unpredictability often means nice, or at least amusing surprises. When I wake each morning, I am not certain what to expect from the day aside from my usual work routine. Most days are uneventful - a visit by the husky bitch from a neighboring farm, who plays with my dog and hopes for a handout, a few pleasantries exchanged with neighbors about potatoes or rain, um galão at the taberna, conversations with my dog to convince him that the neighbor's sheep are not to be hunted - the usual. But anything could happen, and I always look forward to that here.

A dangerous agitator starts a new year of trouble

Another typical day in social media....

For those planning to attend the upcoming university event for SDL technology in Lisbon, be aware that the imams and imamas of the bulk market bog have issued a fatwa against it for the dangerous agitation expected among wordworkers in attendance, who may discover better ways to master a leading translation environment tool and free themselves from the local piecework slavelancing conditions. In particular, revelations that one can collaborate with users and abusers of other translation tools and challenge the divine infrastructure of Linguistic Sausage Producers in orgies of interoperability caused considerable controversy in meetings of Board Members Without Boundaries and Transwordling, who have worked hard to spread the needed money and manure in the field to ensure rich corporate yields for years to come. His Hendzelness the First and Only, pope of the Premium Church of Translation, decried this and other heresies, such as calls for professional translators associations freed of the commercial guidance of their betters at the production of linguistic sausage, in his New Year's sermon to an admiring crowd of underage Czech and Bulgarian colleagues. Those who hope to have a real future should boycott events such as the one planned at Universidade Nova de Lisboa on January 22nd and instead do some real good for the world and volunteer free translation of materials to inform the world that Robert Mugabe is the greatest defender of African dignity against colonialist aggression.

It's been two years and two days since my first arrival at The End of the Earth, prodigal Portugal, immersed in the agony of grief over its lost colonies, where the people still stubbornly refuse to understand how worthless an Agrarland is and that the world needs the machines made in small German villages to run at the tempo dictated by the Bundesbank, Siemens et alia, and flawed human hearts still beat in defiance of the better-engineered alternatives implanted in Merkel and her cronies. Since my transplantation to this Unworthy Place of sun, sangria and sex, I have conspired with other unworthies to continue producing the propaganda of futile resistance to the Borg juggernaut of machine pseudo-translation and the undeniable value it offers as evidenced by the breathless exclamation of leading translation technologits that some translators are actually using it.

In the spirit of that tradition, in 2015 Translation Tribulations hopes to expand its range of heresies to include cartoons honoring the Prophet Mohammed, thepigturd, Mantis/Orbe, Lyingbridge and other Great Leaders who show us how life can be if only we would submit. To that end, the office at Quinta Branca is working to acquire two young goats to provide the necessary therapy for those who dispute the power of the pen as opposed to Le Pen.

Comfort for a frustrated artist forbidden to draw people, about to embark on a new career as a wannabe terrorist

Holiday cookies for the Portuguese, Part 2

Feliz natal, everyone. Around this time of year, I think of various friends and family members with their particular repertoires of seasonal cookies and other treats, which are always something I look forward to and tell myself I'll learn to make one day. This year I decided to try my hand at a favorite German cookie, which is a bit like a shortbread with its high butter content and low sugar. There are, of course, a number of recipes available online, but I wanted to try one I've enjoyed intermittently for 24 years now, and when I asked for it, this is what I got:

Heidesand: 250 g Butter schmelzen, etwas bräunen, wieder fest werden lassen. 100g Zucker und etwas Vanillezucker damit verrühren. Ein Ei, zwei gestrichene Teelöffel Backpulver und 400g Mehl hinzugeben, verkneten, kalt stellen. Rollen formen, in Zucker wälzen, in Scheiben schneiden. Ca. 15 Minuten backen bei 180°C.

Heidesand: Melt 250 g butter and brown it a bit, then let it solidify again. Cream in 100 grams of sugar and a bit of vanilla sugar. Then add an egg, two level teaspoons of baking powder and 400 g of flour; knead the dough and chill it. Form the dough into "logs" and roll these in sugar, then cut off rounds of the dough and bake them at 180°C for about 15 minutes.

I was a bit suspicious of that baking time in my oven and reduced it by several minutes, which was still too long. The first successful batch of cookies baked for about 9 minutes and probably would have been better with a bit less time.

Adjusted for US measurement units, the recipe would be

Heidesand
1 cup (2 sticks) butter
½ cup sugar
1 packet vanilla sugar or 1 tsp vanilla extract
1 egg
2 level teaspoons baking powder
3 cups white wheat flour

Melt and brown the butter somewhat, then let it cool and cream it together with the sugar, add the vanilla flavoring and egg. Then add the flour, sifting it in with the baking powder, and form the crumbly dough into rolls, which can be rolled in sugar if desired (or sugar can be sprinkled on the cut cookies before baking). Wrap these in parchment paper or other suitable material and chill the rolls in the refrigerator or freeze them. Cut off slices from the rolls and bake these at 350°F (180°C) for about 8 or 9 minutes, depending on the conditions in your oven.

I used self-rising flour for a little "boost" and carmelized the sugar, though not completely to a liquid state (throwing in a teaspoon of ground cinnamon in the process), so after it cooled I had to crush and grind it in a mortar. This resulted in cookies with an interesting speckled appearance. I also didn't bother adding extra sugar in most cases, as I prefer these cookies less sweet. They are a little dry, and crumble like sand into one's mouth when bitten.

No matter how much leavening agent is added to the mix, these cookies will not rise much due to all the butter and can be spaced closely together on the tray. This recipe is not very sweet, with about half the amount of sugar found in other versions, so those with more of a sweet tooth could adjust the sugar content accordingly.

SDL Trados Studio in Lisbon – January 22, 2015 – possibilities, experience and expectations

SDL TRADOS - PAST EXPERIENCES,

PRESENT POSSIBILITIES AND FUTURE EXPECTATIONS

Thursday 22 January 2015, Auditório 2, piso 3, Torre B, FCSH

The Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the New University of Lisbon is pleased to invite you to a day of talks on SDL Trados, with special guest speaker Paul Filkin, Director of Client Communities for SDL Language Solutions.

Event schedule (subject to updates)

10:00 Welcome 

10:15 – 11:30 “SDL Open Exchange” with Paul Filkin 

11:30 – 13:00 “Voice Recognition (Portuguese and English) and CAT Tools for translation and PEMT” with David Hardisty, Isabel Rocha and Joana Bernardo. This session will show how to use voice recognition to post-edit machine translation, how voice recognition is available in Portuguese, and how it can be used to cope with physical disability (such as cerebral palsy). 

LUNCH !!!

14:00 – 15:40 “SDL Trados Clinic” with Paul Filkin. In this session Paul will invite the audience to raise common issues they have with Trados, and cover other common issues and solutions. 

16:00 – 17:00 “SDL Trados and Interoperability with other CAT Tools” with Kevin Lossner. This session will present various ways to use SDL Trados to work successfully with those who have other translation environment tools such as memoQ, OmegaT, etc.

Presenters

Paul Filkin has worked for SDL Language Solutions since 2006. His main focus is evangelizing and helping users of SDL technology get the most out of their investment and is often found on social media providing advice wherever needed.  His blog “Multifarious” describes some of the practical challenges for translators and translation companies and how to resolve these with SDL technology in the mix.

Kevin Lossner has a healthy skepticism of translation technologies where it is not clear if they serve their users or the other way around. His blog “Translation Tribulations” discusses SDL Trados Studio, memoQ and more and is the ultimate authority on chocolate chip cookies in Évora, Portugal.

David Hardisty has taught Translation Tools at FCSH/UNL to undergraduate and postgraduate students since the inception of the Translation Programmes at FCSH. He has also worked with Technology in the teaching of ELT and in the last 25 years has co-authored five books published by Oxford University Press.

Isabel Rocha is a Spanish to Portuguese translator with thirty years of experience. She has completed the curriculum component of the Masters in Translation at Lisbon University and preparing to write her thesis.

Joana Bernardo is a Masters Student at FCSH/UNL. She has also studied Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the same university. She became interested in Translation after a summer internship at a subtitling company.

All professionals and students with an interest in modern translation technologies and working methods are welcome to attend this free event. For more information, please contact: David Hardisty [david1610.dh (at) gmail.com] – or just surprise us with your smiling face at the door.

Where the heck is this?

Click this graphic to see the location using Google Maps!

Holiday cookies for the Portuguese, Part 1

Whoever told me once that "close" only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades obviously didn't know squat about baking. Given a little respect, food tends to be more forgiving than most priests in Confession.

My involvement with translation began some nearly four decades ago when an aunt gave me a battered copy of the 1897 edition of Katharina Prato's Süddeutsche Küche. My mother and I then began to translate and adapt recipes for tasty baked goods for a modern American kitchen, making educated guesses about times and temperatures and making up measurable quantities for ingredients specified in only the vaguest terms. At the time I was barely into my teens and wondered how my mother could magically interpret all that vaguery and come up with something so appealing for expanding waistlines, but those first translations taught me the importance of reinterpreting content as necessary for a new culture and different times.

With the holidays approaching and most of my interesting recipes still rumored to be in boxes in a van somewhere in Poland, I called my mother a few days ago and begged for my favorite Christmas cookie recipe - a foundational gingerbread cookie with which she often constructs frosted houses with the grandchildren at this time of year. A short time later, the miracle of e-mail brought me the following instructions:

1 cup shortening (Crisco, lard, etc.)
1¼ cups sugar
1 cup molasses
¾ tablespoon ground ginger
1½ teaspoons baking soda dissolved in 2 tablespoons hot water
½ teaspoon salt
2 rounded teaspoons cinnamon
2 eggs, beaten
6 to 6½ cups flour for a soft dough
Roll out, cut and bake at 350°F for about 10 minutes. Refrigerating the dough may make it easier to handle.

The trouble started with the shortening, but I've usually just substituted butter over the protests that "it's not the same", countering with "who cares, as long as it's good?" Moreover, butter has the advantage of keeping vegan fanatics out of one's cookie jar if they are true to the Faith. This time I discovered a big, forgotten block of Banquete creme vegetal in the fridge, and since I no longer remember why I bought the stuff, it had to go in the cookies.

Then came the molasses crisis. the English word is derived from the Portuguese melaço, but try telling that to the people of Portugal. Perhaps it's the grief over the loss of their colony in Brazil which caused them to cut their ties to this critical ingredient, but searches of several supermarkets near me have failed to turn up any trace. Oh well, brown sugar it is then.

One thing led to another, and with a why not this?and a why not that?, and a doubling of the egg content to cut the stress on the mixer motor and get rid of excess eggs, and a surprising shortage of ginger powder, which required half measures, the final mix came out as

115 g vegetable shortening (creme vegetal)  
230 g brown sugar (açucar moreno)
2 eggs (ovos)
2 teaspooons ground ginger (2 colheres de chá de gengibre em po)
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon (1 colher de chá de canela moída)
¼ teaspoon ground cloves (¼ colher de chá de cravinho moída)
¼ teaspoon fine dry salt (¼ colher de chá de sal fino seco)
450 g self-rising wheat flour (farinha de trigo com fermento)

As with most of my cookies, I creamed the fat and sugar together, then added the egg (I let the mixer do the work of beating) and spices (with the idea that the flavors will mix better in more intimate contact with the fat), followed by the flour, with the speed turned down to low and the time limited to avoid knitting the gluten in the dough.

My cookie cutters disappeared in the last move, so Plan B was to form the dough into a roll, chill it good and use a sharp knife to slice off ¼" (6 mm) thick  rounds, which were then baked for 8 minutes at about 350°F (175°C) on a parchment sheet. These cookies are lighter than the original recipe (more leavening), so they bake faster, and ten minutes in my oven puts a carbon crust on the bottom which might not be to every taste. But of course, times will need to be re-translated for the conditions of your oven.

The final result was nothing like the original, though it was rather tasty. A failed score for translation with many reviewers, I'm sure, as they stuff their faces with the culinary success.

Now it's back to the kitchen to see what happens if caramel syrup takes the place of the missing melaço,

Seven days of gratitude, day seven: free will

The choice of subject for the last post reflecting on things for which I am grateful was delayed by what my German friends sometimes call die Qual der Wahl, the agony of choice. As I grumble my way through the daily routine, feel the sore muscles from last Saturday's hunt with the dogs in the mountainous terrain of an enormous Eucalyptus forest plantation and the mild indigestion burn from one too many spicy calzones for lunch I am not particularly conscious of gratitude. What I do notice, however, is a relaxed optimism about a very unknown future in a country and a culture that will take me several decades at least to understand in the depth I wish to. There are days when the decision to leave Germany might seem as daft as some of my German friends considered it, particularly on days when I have to have anything to do with monolingual medical office personnel in Évora, who do not understand that faster repetition of what I did not understand the first time will not lead to quicker understanding. There are more than a few things missing in my present life, which I used to take for granted; sometimes hot water for washing and fire for cooking are among them when I fail to understand the trick for connecting a new tank of butane to supply my water heater and stove. But although friends in the UK and elsewhere have often expressed great admiration for the quality of public utilities, water pressure and bathroom fixtures in Germany, I find less satisfaction in these than in the feeling that I am among reasonable people of good will who treat others with good, basic respect. If the state of household technology is sometimes not much above that of a primitive campsite, at least I am camping with people I would be pleased to call friends.

Coming to Portugal was a choice. A good one I think; many of the choices in my life have certainly been less good or at least less satisfying, but they were mine to make, and I am grateful for the control over my own life which enables me to make a very wide range of choices and act on them. One of the greatest difficulties I have with German, Germany and German cultures comes down to a single word: muß. Or "muss" after the not-so-new spelling reform. Must. Some days it seems to be part of every spoken sentence in that language. When I used to hear that word too much, sometimes I would reply acidly that to live I must breathe, eat and drink, and some day I must die. Everything else is optional. Until they go abroad for a while or make the acquaintance of many people from other cultures, a great number of Germans seemed to feel that there was really only one way to do anything. Former neighbors of mine in rural Brandenburg certainly felt that way about feeding chickens, a task which must occur on a regular schedule at specific times of the day and always include boiled potatoes. Without those potatoes the best quality poultry feed will fail to meet a chicken's fundamental nutritional requirements.

I think it's a sad life for those who feel their choices are determined by others. Made with the finest cloth and decorated with masterful embroidery, a straightjacket is still an article of clothing of no good use to one wearing it with a healthy mind. The sick, crazy ones may indeed derive benefits from the straightjacket of social or political convention, but I prefer to let my own free will make the final decision after evaluating the consequences of action by my own standards.

Even in risk-averse cultures like that found in Germany, there is some acknowledgement that success often has many failures as its prerequisite, and many failures - or success - require many choices.

I am also grateful to have lived my life in political environments where the consequence of my choices are generally less critical than they might be more repressive, less stable parts of the world. But in these places the ones who often sacrifice themselves for things that I and my readers take for granted probably have a deeper understanding of why the exercise and defense of their rights of free choice are so important, perhaps more important than their lives.

As a freelance translator I have opportunities to exercise my free will with great scope in business, market my services or not and pursue my own visions of service and quality. And when the nattering nabobs of false positivism tell me I should be grateful for the chance to use Vaseline in my business relations with Linguistic Sausage Producers (LSPs), I gratefully exercise my free will and ignore this stupid advice and choose to associate myself with other service providers instead. You can choose to do the same, and I hope you do.

This is the last day of my written reflections of gratitude for the many blessings in a sometimes subjectively difficult life. I am grateful to my friend Teresa, a young veterinary behaviorist and fellow dog trainer, for the challenge to take the time to think in a more structured way about what constitutes the real wealth in my life. In the time I have lived in Portugal, becoming ever less a stranger in a strange land and more one discovering a heart's home, she and other friends have provided many occasions for such reflection. And in a poor region of the country, in an economically distressed city where I have often seen people dumpster diving for food or making complex life compromises to survive, much less thrive, I am often comforted by observing how Portuguese people respect their rights of choice and choose to live.

So on this seventh and last day of gratitude I choose to express mine for free will. Because I can.



*******
Day One – Teachers Day Two – Storytellers Day Three – This Old Frying Pan Day Four – Dogs Day Five – Dissidents Day Six – Hands

Even more cookies for the Portuguese

Diabetes seems to be a rather common affliction in Portugal, which is no great wonder given the sweet tooth so many people here have. This is expressed in a great variety of cookies one finds offered in markets of every kind, most of which are quite different from the cookies familiar to me in the American and German baking traditions. As I have made batch after batch of American cookies for my friends and neighbors in Portugal, I've had a little nagging sense of guilt at what damage I might be doing contributing to their diabetic state, but the thought that cutting down their consumption of cerveja to, perhaps, a dozen bottles a day might also help with the diabetes does assuage my guilt somewhat so I can keep the grandchildren in my neighborhood supplied with a better fix than some offer in Bairro da Câmara.

Sourcing ingredients is often difficult here, partly because I'm still learning the local names of things but also because many things are simply not available. Take sheep butter, for example. As far as I know, it's only found around here at Intermarche, and the other day it was sold out, so I had to settle for goat butter. Life can be rough. If you want something really exotic like chocolate chips or cream of tartar, you just have to substitute creatively. I do a lot of that. And because I'm in Portugal, it never hurts to add garlic. It adds a new dimension to Spätzle, Portuguese-style for example.

It's actually hard to get the sugars I want here in the heart of the country. White granulated sugar? No problem, though I prefer its common yellow cousin here. But the darker stuff, açúcar moreno, isn't so easy, particularly if you like it really dark. So when I discovered a bag of deep brown sugar with a satisfying molasses whiff to it, I was delighted and snatched it up for the next batch of cookies. These were good, but turned out to be a little strange.

Not that sweet, really. Since I had tweaked other things in what was once a chocolate chip cookie recipe (goat butter, whole wheat flour, Toblerone dark chocolate bars with almond nougat), I dumbed down the other stuff and just tweaked the sugar. These cookies were even better, but still not overpoweringly sweet, then I noticed that the package bore the words "brown rice sugar". For real. I thought it was a translation error, but there really is a sugar substitute made from brown rice. And it's not bad. So I offer you this variation on the new trending cookie of Évora, chipped chocolate:

100 g brown rice sugar
125 g (½ cup) butter (cow, goat, sheep - do what thou wilt)

Cream these together, then add

1 egg
1 tablespoon amèndoa amarga (I was out of vanilla extract)
2 teaspoons orange zest (this is the killer cookie ingredient)

Whip it some more, then add

½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon baking soda
225 grams flour (usually wheat of some kind, but if the spirit moves you, substitute rye, corn or oat flour as much as you like)

Mix until all the flour is evenly distributed in the wet dough, then add  

 200 g chipped baking chocolate (dark)

Drop on parchment and bake at 175°C (350°F) for something like 10 minutes.

I told my friend with diabetes that these were better for her. That might not be true, but given the response I think I'll keep lying.

And now for something completely different. I decided it was time to introduce the local Catholics to some good Chanukah tradition: sweet potato latkes served with Greek yogurt and pureed mangos. That seems to be a hit as well (with extra portions set aside for grandchildren), but afterward I was faced with the problem of half a bowl of mango puree and no idea what to do with it. So I did a little research and improvised these mango cookies, which are perhaps the best thing I've made this month:

½ cup butter
1 cup yellow sugar
¼ cup brown rice sugar
2 eggs
2 tsp vanilla
1 ½ tsp cinnamon
2/3 cup mango puree
1 tsp baking soda
1.5 cups wheat flour
1.5 cups corn flour
½ cup of milk

Cream the butter and sugars, then add egg, mango and vanilla. After the mixture is creamed, add 2 cups of flour, the baking soda and cinnamon
Bake in a preheated 375°F oven for about 10 minutes or until golden brown.

I suppose you can mess around with the sugars any way you like; I like substituting corn flours for wheat in recipes where gluten isn't needed, and I think it usually improves the character of a cookie. I may try a batch of these using just corn flour. And maybe drop the milk and use more mango puree. And a bunch of other little adjustments, because while lazy translators may crave repetitions, I find that boring in recipes, which I consider to be like German laws: there to be flouted as long as it's a victimless crime. I only make an exception with phenolphthaelin as an additive on special occasions for those on the run.

In the batch I made, it seems that the brown rice sugar was not perfectly mixed in and formed interesting little pockets, which produced a surprising effect when baked. I can't describe it; it needs to be experienced. And it is a delight!